Sometimes there are situations and events you know you will work your way back to. At a given moment you have other concerns but you will not allow the passage of time to carry a moment so far downstream that it will escape your memory and consciousness without being remarked upon. And so it is with me, now.
Yesterday was International Holocaust Remembrance Day. It has been seventy-three years since the Soviet Union's Red Army liberated Auschwitz, Poland. You and I want to believe (actually pretend is probably the operational word) in 2018 it is impossible that the industrial horror and mechanized savagery of The Nazi's Final Solution could ever be forgotten but, look across the globe (and not too far over a state line), and not only is that not so but we encounter deniers who lie to themselves and others who insist that none of the nightmare that was the Nazi's Final Solution ever happened.
Such people are not misinformed and attempting to excuse them by suggesting such makes you complicit in their misdeeds. Simply put, they are evil for so believing, and for persisting and insisting that the horrors that happened, didn't occur. You're busy and don't want to find the time for viewing this right now.
I almost understand, except because we don't all have the time for the truth, the lie gets yet another chance to spread some more and it oozes its way into more lives and we sink a little deeper in the muck of our own perdition.
Every year, there are fewer and fewer survivors of the camp who observe the anniversary of its liberation and someday in the not too distant future there will be no one with first-hand recollections. That's why, in a world with strife and death driven by deep-seated and irrational hatreds of all kinds, where truth has become some kind of obscene fashion accessory we, each of us, needs to be a witness for the truth of the Holocaust and for injustice and murder anywhere we find it on this earth.
As it is in Heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil. Amen.
-bill kenny
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